Research Projects

Urban flooding is a critical global challenge, which is a frequent disaster in India due to unplanned settlements and dense population. Conventional stormwater management systems (SMSs) have been inadequate due to improper design methodologies, poor maintenance, and climate change-driven intensified weather events. The SMSs designs are often fail-fail in nature, accounting only for failure probability and not the failure consequences crucial for flood mitigation. This project aims to develop a safe-fail hydro-economic framework, integrating flood severity, decentralized solutions, economic considerations, climate change impact and other co-benefits to enhance urban resilience against flooding. Rationale: Current SMS designs are simplistic, with questionable assumptions such as rainfall-runoff equivalence and sufficiency of critical duration, and do not address the root cause (incorporating flood property in designs). Densely urbanized areas provide limited scope for revisiting the existing design and implementation of any low-impact interventions (LIIs), warranting innovative decentralized community-driven solutions for flood management. A safe-fail approach that addresses these gaps by developing statistical and hydrodynamic modeling techniques and accounting for economic considerations and potential co-benefits is necessary for urban flood disaster mitigation. Specific objectives: 1. Develop a hydro-economic framework for the safe-fail design of SMSs, integrating flood severity, decentralized solutions, economic aspects, climate change, and co-benefits. 2. Explore decentralized, community-driven stormwater management solutions and their potential in flood severity reduction and ecosystem services. 3. Create an integrated, location-specific flood mitigation solutions exploration tool, supported by real-time adaptive forecasting for policymaking. Experiments: Successful completion of the proposed objectives involves the Formulation of the optimization problem, detailed remote sensing survey, development of the detailed hydrologic-hydraulic model, conceptualization of safe-fail hydro-economic design procedure; incorporation of climate change impact into the design, identification of actionable solutions for the study area; development of adaptive flood forecasting tool. Significance and expected impact: 1. Significant contribution to engineering science with a first-of-its-kind approach to urban flood management. 2. Potential to save crores of rupees with cost-effective sustainable solutions. 3. Empower policymakers with location-specific, actionable solutions. 4. Contribution to Sustainable development goals and climate action plan and several national missions. 5. Enhance community participation in disaster mitigation and provide ecosystem co-benefits for water quality improvement and heat-island effect mitigation.